Former President Clinton's Foundation On Defensive After Reports It Steered Money To Friend
PATERSON, N.J. (CBSNewYork) -- Questions were mounting late Friday about the Clinton foundation steering money to a friend of former President Bill Clinton, and whether it violated federal law.
As CBS2's Christine Sloan reported, Clinton faced a friendly crowd in Paterson, New Jersey as he campaigned for his wife, Hillary Clinton, for president on Friday. But he was dealing with problems on a different front.
The Wall Street Journal reported the Clinton Global Initiative, a nonprofit, arranged a $2 million commitment to a for-profit company partly owned by Julie Tauber McMahon, who is close friends with Mr. Clinton and made front-page tabloid news on Friday.
Peter Schweizer has written exclusively about Hillary and Bill Clinton, and his book is the subject of a new documentary.
"It's part of this broader pattern that I call the Clinton blur, when you see a blur between private companies, philanthropy and government service," Schweizer said.
The Clinton Foundation slammed the Wall Street Journal story, saying it "displayed a willful ignorance on how CGI's model works" and that "this specific company was working to make homes more energy efficient."
David Birdsell knows a lot about nonprofits. He is a professor at Baruch College.
"Nonprofits can certainly invest money in for-profit enterprises to the extent that it is fulfilling a mission, and to the extent that it is an efficient fully disclosed use of funds," he said.
That is what the foundation claims it did.
"Certainly on the basis of what we've been shown so far, there is no evidence that there's been a federal law broken," Birdsell said.
But Schweizer said criticism of Clinton's donations and associations will not be going away,
"I do think that there is a sense that they have that the rules apply to them," he said.
CBS2 also reached out to McMahon and the company he owns. Neither had returned correspondence late Friday afternoon.
